This interview is an excerpt from a podcast recording on the Payment Show with SeerBit’s Digital Marketing Lead, Onisokumen Egwu. To listen to the full interview, please click this link.
State briefly what SeerBit does and what your value proposition is in the African market?
SeerBit is a payment processing platform that primarily helps online and offline businesses in sub-Saharan Africa get paid for their goods and services, and also creates ease of scale for merchants looking to expand their operations across the continent.
In addition to providing payment services for online merchants, we at SeerBit came to the realization that the majority of the market’s existing payment processors do not cater to the 95% of MSMEs in Africa’s informal commercial sector that typically carry out their operations offline.
SeerBit’s payment solution(s) addresses this demographic, meets them at the point of their payment needs, and helps them to realize their business growth potential.
Describe a typical scenario of how SeerBit is helping offline businesses grow?
Take for example, a restaurant owner based in Accra, Ghana. Traditionally, this type of merchant relies on customers to physically walk in and purchase food to make his/her sales. This generally restricts the restaurant to only customers that walk in physically.
However, at SeerBit, we typically show merchants the sales potential of reaching an online demographic and empowering some of their walk-in customers with the option to transact digitally.
In this scenario, all that the merchant would need to do is set up a business WhatsApp account to communicate with these online customers, and then use SeerBit’s payment link to accept payment from them. To shed more light on this process, the customer after receiving the payment link can now proceed to put in their details, and then choose their preferred mode of payment which include but are not limited to credit/debit card, bank transfer, account, and mobile money.
What we at SeerBit have done aside helping this merchant to seamlessly process this transaction, is also found a way to partially digitize the business operations and enabled him/her to reach more customers which positively impacts sales.
How Long Does It Take A Merchant To Set Up A SeerBit Solution?
Setting up a solution for merchants takes on average 3 minutes. Typical delays during the onboarding stage are largely due to the inability of the merchant to readily provide the requisite regulatory requirements that exist to protect SeerBit from fraudulent activities. These usually include corporate registration documents, government-issued IDs of the business directors and other statutory documents that prove the businesses legitimacy. Otherwise, SeerBit’s set-up, verification and activation process takes a maximum of 24 hours.
Does SeerBit process international transactions?
In addition to local transactions, SeerBit also helps merchants process international payments. How this works is, SeerBit as the merchant’s payment gateway, processes the customer transaction(s) which was done via our payment checkout, invoice solution, payment link and other payment network distributed solutions.We would then proceed to settle the merchant in local currency.
On the flip side, our more popular option is helping foreign businesses that are looking to expand their operations into Africa to easily penetrate into the market by processing their transactions in our local currencies, and providing the utmost convenience to the African consumer.
How safe is SeerBit’s solution when it comes to fraud?
On a broader scale, payment processing platforms like SeerBit, are governed by the country’s regulatory banks, which goes a long way to protect businesses and consumers from fraudulent activities.
Internally, SeerBit is a certified PCI-DSS payment processor, and we specialise in providing a payment processing solution that comes equipped with a suite of advanced fraud protection tools and a powerful risk management analysis.
This interview is an excerpt from a podcast recording on the Payment Show with SeerBit’s Digital Marketing Lead, Onisokumen Egwu. To listen to the full interview, please click this link.
